Prayers to Broken Stones (28 page)

Louis squeezes her hand.

He looks around again.

He takes a deep breath.

Louis removes one of the heavy gloves. His hand blazes with violet light. He removes the other glove and the glare from his two hands throws wild shadows around the room. He raises his hands, staring at them.

He lays the palm of one glowing hand an inch from flesh just below her throat. We wait a second and then see the ripple as a tumor slug slides up toward the light. Louis grimaces but does not remove his hand as the slug emerges from her skin, tests the air with its moist antennae, and then slides
into
Louis’s palm. A second one follows, enters Louis’s hand. A third. Louis holds his hand there a moment longer but no more emerge.

He lifts his hand and we can see the turmoil under the violet-hued flesh of his bare forearm as the slugs curl and writhe in their new home. Louis shifts sideways in the chair and lowers his head almost to his knees, hugging his arm to his chest.

The lightning flashes soundlessly. Behind and above Louis, high on the wall, the head and shoulders of a cancer vampire emerge from the solid wall like a predator pressing its way through its own amniotic sac. Louis can not see it behind him. The thing makes no noise as it pulls its arms through, finds purchase on the wall with its impossibly long fingers, and pulls itself out like a swimmer emerging from a pool. The cancer vampire slides down the wall, as silent as a lizard, and disappears behind the hunched-over Louis. Louis’s mother moans in her sleep and Louis stands, whirls, and knocks the chair aside.

The cancer vampire was crouching over Louis’s mother but now it rises, lifts long fingers and its funneled face toward the glow that is Louis.

Louis extends his hands in the motion that is, once again, vaguely sacramental. The cancer vampire flows toward him, lowers its terrible face toward the outstretched, glowing hands.

The thing’s proboscis seems to extend right into the flesh
of Louis’s open palms. Louis’s forearms writhe with the motion of tumor slugs. We hear the SLURPING, SLIDING. Finished, the thing suddenly pulls its head back and begins jerking, spasming.

The cancer vampire spasms and convulses. The violet glow increases as the radiation spreads. There is a HISSING, BURNING sound as of acid burning through thick paper. The cancer vampire collapses, curls into itself, and seems to shrivel while the HISSING continues. Its long fingers close slowly … like the legs of a dying spider. Louis staggers to his mother’s bed, collapses on the edge of it, and pulls on the heavy gloves.

We see a close-up of his mother’s face—she is resting more comfortably. He again takes her hand, pats it clumsily through his heavy gloves.

In E.C.U. we see her hand twitch, possibly a random movement, possibly squeezing his in affirmation. Louis stands, looks toward the dark hall.

Louis touches his mother’s hand a final time and walks to the door, pausing before stepping into the darkness there.

Louis steps out and is gone. We watch and listen from a low angle near his mother’s sleeping form as his footsteps recede … for a moment there is silence … and then the SLURPING, SLIDING, RASPING begins, grows in volume, builds to a chorus. But with the noises comes a promising violet glow, growing brighter down the corridor, filling the doorway, filling the entire room with its warmth, as we …

FADE OUT

I was born in 1948. By the time Kennedy was elected in 1960, World War II seemed like ancient history. Not just to
me
 … everything is ancient history to a twelve-year-old … but, I believe, to most people in America then. The countless veterans had come home, and while many individuals had to deal with the traumas of war, the vast majority of them put the war behind them in various ways: went on to school on the Gl Bill or got on with starting families, bought homes, and renewed their lives. Many of the men and women in my parents’ generation had changed during the war, but most for the better. Travel and combat had brought some half-sensed maturity to the men; work and participation in the war effort had brought some inexpressable confidence and widening of horizons to the women.
America
had changed forever—gone forever was the isolationist, essentially rural nation recovering from the trauma of the Depression. I was born into the world’s greatest superpower. We had the Bomb, economic prosperity, an unlimited future, and a young president who promised a New Frontier.

World War II was ancient history. Fifteen years had passed since our victory over the dictatorships, and even the brutal dress rehearsal of Korea hadn’t changed our optimism. The
real
war was long ago and far away.

As I write this, fifteen years have passed since the last Americans fled Vietnam. Seventeen years have gone by since we withdrew our fighting forces. Two
decades
—a
fifth of our century—have elapsed since the height of our involvement there. Yet, I feel, we’re just beginning to find some collective peace of mind about Vietnam.

I suppose someone has suggested the parallel (it may be a cliché by now, for all I know), but it occurs to me that the stages of our national response to the trauma of Vietnam closely reflect the classic stages of response to the death of a loved one or the reaction to learning one has a terminal illness. Just look at our movies about Vietnam over the past twenty years.

First, denial: No major films.
Nada.

Then anger: The cathartic “Coming Home” mental rewrites where the veterans were either anti-war martyrs or nutcases, followed by the revisionist fantasies of Rambo and his clones.

Then depression: The one brilliant depiction of the war was “Apocalypse Now,” but Coppola jumped a stage in our recovery cycle so his effort was shunned. If he had waited until
after
we’d sickened of our Rambo fantasies, the film would have been received quite differently.

Finally, acceptance: “Platoon” and “Full Metal Jacket” and “Casualties of War” and the other post-trauma films have—despite the ballyhoo to the contrary—little content, less philosophy. What they
do
have is a shockingly correct texture—something quite close to the real smell of sweat and crotch rot, something surprisingly near to the actual language and true fatigue and terrible claustrophobia of a patrol in the boonies, something almost
right
about the fear that rises from the actors on the screen and spreads to the audience like the stench from a day-old corpse.

And so, after two decades and with an entire new generation which has grown up bored with the whole topic, after more changes in the texture of daily life than we can imagine or accept, I think we’re finally beginning to
feel
—if not really understand—the true dimensions of the terrible national traffic accident that was Vietnam.

But for some people, that’s just the beginning of the process.

The twenty-eight Huey gunships moved out in single file, each hovering a precise three meters above the tarmac, the sound of their rotors filling the world with a roar that could be felt in teeth and bones and testicles. Once above the treeline and gaining altitude, the helicopters separated into four staggered V-formations and the noise diminished to the point where shouts could be heard.

“First time out?” cried the guide.

“What?” Justin Jeffries turned away from the open door where he had been watching the shadow of their helicopter slide across the surface of the mirrored rice paddies below. He leaned toward the guide until their combat helmets were almost touching.

“First time out?” repeated the guide. The man was small even for a Vietnamese. He wore a wide grin and the uniform and shoulder patch of the old First Air Cav Division.

Jeffries was big even for an American. He was dressed in green shorts, a flowered Hawaiian shirt, Nike running sandals, an expensive Rolex comlog, and a U.S. Army helmet that had become obsolete the year he was born. Jeffries was draped about with cameras; a compact Yashika SLR, a Polaroid Holistic-360, and a new Nikon
imager. He returned the guide’s grin. “First time for us. We’re here with my wife’s father.”

Heather leaned over to join the conversation. “Daddy was here during … you know … the war. They thought it might be good for him to take the Vet Tour.” She nodded in the direction of a short, solid, gray-haired man leaning against the M-60 machine-gun mount near the door’s safety webbing. He was the only person in the cabin not wearing a helmet. The back of his blue shirt was soaked with sweat.

“Yes., yes,” smiled the guide and stepped back to plug his microphone jack into a bulkhead socket. His voice echoed tinnily in every helmet and from hidden speakers. “Ladies and gentlemen, please notice the treeline to your right.”

There was a lurch as the passengers shifted their positions and craned for a view. Ten-year-old Sammee Jeffries and his eight-year-old sister Elizabeth shoved their way through the crowded space to stand next to where their grandfather sat by the open door. The barrel of Elizabeth’s plastic M-16 accidentally struck the older man on his sunburned neck but he did not turn or speak.

Suddenly a series of flashes erupted from the treeline along one rice paddy. The passengers gasped audibly as a line of magnesium-bright tracer bullets rose up and lashed toward their ship, missing the rotors by only a few meters. Immediately one of the gunships at the rear of their V-formation dove, curved back the way they had come in a centrifugally perfect arc, and raked the treeline with rocket and minigun fire. Meanwhile, at the guide’s urging, Sammee stood on a low box, grasped the two-handed grip of the heavy M-60, swung it awkwardly to bear in the general direction of the now-distant treeline, and depressed the firing studs. The passengers instinctively clutched at their helmets to block their ears. Heavy cartridges, warm but not hot enough to burn anyone, clattered onto the metal deck.

An explosion split the treeline, sending phosphorous streamers fifty meters into the air and setting several tall palms ablaze. Bits of flaming debris splashed into the
quiet rice paddy. The passengers laughed and applauded. Sammee grinned back at them and flexed his muscles.

Elizabeth leaned against her grandfather and spoke loudly into his ear. “Isn’t this
fun,
Grandpa?”

He turned to say something but at that second the guide announced that their destination would be coming up on the left side of the ship and Elizabeth was away, shoving her brother aside to get a better view, eager to see the village appear below out of the heat-haze and smoke.